Think gun crime is worse now? Not so.

Findings counter impressions that firearm use is on rise

San Diego  It is the subject of nightly television news reports, daily newspaper stories and prime time dramas. Gun violence is seemingly everywhere you turn.

Ask Americans how bad they think gun crime is, and 82 percent will say it is either worse than it was 20 years ago, or mostly the same, according to a Pew Research Center survey released this month.

But the numbers on gun crime show otherwise.

Firearm homicide and other gun crimes — including robbery and assault — are strikingly lower than they were two decades ago, a trend that has mirrored the decline of violent crime overall, according to new county and national data.

In San Diego County, gun homicides fell about 69 percent in the past 20 years.

In fact, the majority of gun deaths are suicides, accounting for six out of 10 gun deaths nationwide. Locally, suicide made up more than two-thirds of the 211 gun deaths last year, the county Medical Examiner’s Office reported.

So how did the public perception get so skewed?

Professor Sheldon Zhang, chair of the sociology department at San Diego State University, said the public has always believed gun violence and crime to be high — whether the actual statistics back it up or not.

“The perception of gun violence has remained relatively stable across the decades,” said the professor, who specializes in criminology. “By and large, Americans and foreigners all think the U.S. is a country with a high level of gun violence.”

The crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s that fueled gang turf wars, drive-by shootings and random violence climaxed in the early ‘90s, when gun homicides peaked around the nation and in San Diego County.

Since then, gun homicides have fallen 72 percent nationwide — with 11,078 in 2010 compared to 39,595 in 1993, Pew reports. Nonfatal gun crime also has decreased, with 467,000 incidents in 2011 compared to 1.5 million in 1993.

In San Diego County, overall crime is back to levels not seen since the 1960s.

“Try telling that to people on the street, and they’ll laugh at you, and probably have their own anecdotes or stories,” Zhang said. “That’s the problem. It’s a constant battle, we have to constantly remind people.”

Gun deaths in San Diego

“These things are pretty hard to hide, unlike rape, assault and robbery (which) often times go unreported,” said Zhang. “Homicides are among the best-reported crime statistics.”

Of the 110 murders in San Diego County last year, about half involved firearms.

Handguns have been shown to be the weapon of choice when it comes to suicides and homicides, according to county medical examiner data.

So who is using guns, and who is being victimized? Local analysis suggests it is overwhelmingly men killing other men in gang violence and fights. Last year, Latino males were most likely to be victimized, followed by black males — a disproportionate share when it comes to county population figures.

Of the 28 gang-related murders in the county last year, 72 percent involved a firearm, according to the San Diego Association of Goverments, which compiles crime data for the region. The majority occurred in the city of San Diego.

Women tend to be victimized in domestic violence killings, with guns being the most common weapon used in murder-suicides.

But to these victims and their surviving families, the debate over public perception and actual crime trends likely doesn’t provide much solace.

“If you’re the victim of that crime, you don’t care about the national statistic,” said Sheriff Bill Gore. “But when you look at those statistics, your chances of being the victim of that crime are less.”

The media’s role

The sheriff, who often hears the public sentiment of high crime, pointed to the news media and entertainment industry — and the public’s new accessibility to information through social media and technology — as partly to blame.

“If there’s not crime in San Diego, then they’ll bring you something from Los Angeles or back East or somewhere else in the world. ... That’s what you get to see in your living room,” Gore said. “I think it affects the perception of the world you live in.”

Take the nonstop coverage of the Jodi Arias murder trial in Arizona over the past month on cable news networks. One cable channel, Investigation Discovery, solely airs shows about crime and murder.

According to Pew, crime stories on local TV news accounted for 17 percent of airtime last year, trailing only traffic and weather as the most common type of stories.

“The Internet and cable news media are voracious and they have to fill up time,” said Dan Baum, who explores gun culture in his new book “Gun Guys: A Road Trip.”

Those impressions of high crime are only amped when a major incident rocks the country, such as the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting, or the Newtown, Conn., school massacre.

“Those cases are very difficult to prevent and have the most profound impact on public perceptions in regard to gun violence,” Zhang said.

Related

Gun control debate

So what kind of effect does this perception have on the public discourse surrounding gun control? Not a good one, Baum said. He contends both sides of the gun control debate want the public to think gun violence is higher than it really is.

“The NRA wants people to believe crime is out of control so everyone has a gun, and the crime controllers want people to believe crime is out of control so we have to do something about guns. There’s an unwitting conspiracy to lie about this,” said Baum, a Boulder, Colo., resident and a self-described gun-toting liberal.

“It’s really bad for public discourse, because it’s not true. It’s frightening people.”

From mid-March to early April — as Congress tried to come up with strong legislation following the Newtown school shooting — the debate over gun control was the single biggest news story to get the public’s attention, according to Pew.

As in cities across the nation, the massacre stirred San Diegans to action. The local chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was mostly a one-woman operation until the Dec. 12 Newtown shooting, in which 20 children and six adults were slain. The group has since swelled to about 30 regulars, who say no amount of gun crime is acceptable.

“You think, ‘That could’ve been me, or that could’ve been my child in school.’ That’s what caught people’s eye and drives it closer to home,” said Liz Harley, a Brady volunteer who lives in Del Cerro.

“When it comes to children being killed, that’s a game changer for all of us. So many of us are parents.”

For now, experts say the debate over gun control has come to a standstill, with the Senate rejecting the White House’s legislation last month.

Baum pointed out that even though gun crime has fallen significantly, it’s still much higher than in other developed nations — ranking above Canada, Western Europe and Scandinavian countries. It is lower, however, than some Latin American and Caribbean countries.

“It’s still something that needs to be addressed, and we’re not addressing it,” Baum said.

“We’re pretty stupid about this issue in this country. ... We’re stuck here. Nobody is getting what he wants.”